Ever-expanding Santa Rosa Academy is hoping to offer its partial home-schooling program to a larger portion of its students, a change that Menifee Union School District’s governing board wants a closer look at before considering modifications to the school’s charter petition.

With two board members absent Tuesday, the board decided to table the school’s push to increase classroom sizes -- from 20 to 25 -- for elementary students enrolled in its partial home-schooling program.

The change is needed, school officials said, to accommodate the kind of growth that triggered the construction of a new campus that’s expected to open next fall.

“We have endorsed having this Santa Rosa Academy charter from the very beginning and we’ve been very supportive of what they’ve done,” said Trustee Robert O’Donnell, noting Jerry Bowman’s and Rita Peters’ absence Tuesday. “But I want my board to be very in tune with any changes, and this is a change of going from 20 to 25 students. I think there are some questions that we need to ferret out to find out where they are going and what they are doing.”

The proposed change would have Santa Rosa’s elementary students on the school’s white track -- three days of home school a week and two in a classroom -- learning in on-site settings that match the rest of the school’s 25-students-per classroom caps.

Although the majority of the school’s approximate 1,100 students attend classes on campus on a full-time basis as part of its “blue track,” its full-time home-schooled students who are on a “red track” are seeing more and more value in on-site learning, Principal Laura Badillo said.

“Some of our parents who have been on our red track and are home-schooling like what they are seeing with our white track,” Badillo said. “They are saying, ‘I want to get on white track,’ and there hasn’t been room.

“This is going to give us an opportunity to get more (students) in.”

Sufficient room won’t be a problem much longer for a school that is still splitting its services between two campuses -- at a site east of Mt. San Jacinto’s Menifee Valley Campus and at Menifee Elementary School.

A 27-acre, $23 million campus at Menifee’s Town Center at Haun and La Piedra roads is expected to open to students in October.

Once the school is completed, Badillo said she expects enrollment to balloon to 1,500 and the school’s staff to jump from 65 to about 100 to support the charter school’s ultimate mission -- “to create a school that is highly regarded for academic excellence within a flexible and innovative learning environment.”

Badillo said the new campus is about 70 percent complete. Just five years ago, the start-up school was sharing a shopping center with a hookah lounge.

“It’s beyond what we expected, but we all really love what we do here,” Badillo said. “If Disneyland is ‘The Happiest Place on Earth,’ then Santa Rosa needs to be the second. School should be fun. It should be a place where we’re welcomed.

“We’re all excited to see this growth.”

Menifee Union’s governing board is, too.

“We know they are building a brand new school and they are giving other opportunities to our families out here in Menifee, which is a good thing,” O’Donnell said.

Although the class size for about 200 students who are on the white track would increase under the proposed change, the school’s overall cap at 25 students per class is line with the district, which has an average of at least 26 students per class at all grade levels, Superintendent Steve Kennedy said.

Santa Rosa is simply hoping to provide another option for its parents who are home-schooling their children on a full-time basis, Badillo said.

“We wanted to support parents who were choosing home school who were afraid and wanted someone to guide them,” said Badillo, noting that several “red” and “white” track students are budding actors and athletes who require schedule flexibility. “White track is a real partnership in that we’re sharing the load.”

The board is expected to discuss the changes at its next meeting on May 28.